Der Blogger

"Enough is enough!" "This can't go on!" "This has to stop!" These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before.

Wanderlust

As a travel destination, Germany has never been more popular. With tourist numbers forecast to rise for an eighth consecutive year, what is the country doing right to account for its thriving visitor numbers?

Akademia

For education experts, English language lessons have proven valuable in primary schools in North Rhine-Westphalia. But the Alternative for Germany’s state parliamentary group in NRW have a rather different view.

Essen & Trinken

Police in the city of Osnabrück had to clear crowds in front of a new döner kebab shop on Tuesday, after about 150 hungry people packed the street outside, eager to get their hands on a döner for only €0.01.

Germericana

Many Americans have German ancestors — and that's also the case for actress Meghan Markle, who will be marrying Prince Harry, himself a descendant of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a German dynasty.

Adolf Hitler’s Vision of Germania Still Casts its Long Shadow Over Berlin

In the south of Berlin, there is a massive pillar; one of the few remnants of the National Socialists’ attempts to make Berlin the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich, equaled only by Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, it now sits amongst shabby, peach-colored residential blocks.

The monstrous concrete structure has a 21-meter radius and weighs the same as 22 Airbus A380s. It rises above the ground over four stories tall and extends a further 18 meters into the ground. The Schwerbelastungskörper, or “heavy load test structure,” was built to simulate the weight of one of the four pillars of the planned 120-meter-tall Triumphal Arch. The Arch would have stood on the north-south axis of Germania, and this pillar would have been on its northeastern side.

“Berlin’s swampy ground was seen as a potential hindrance for such a massive structure, so the engineers of the German Society for Soil Mechanics were commissioned to check the extent to which it would have to be reinforced,” says Micha Richter, a Berlin architect and leading member of Berlin Underworlds, an association that holds tours of historic sites across – and mainly underneath – the city. Its 12,650 tons of concrete were poured over seven months in 1941,” he says.

Welthauptstadt Germania, World Capital Germany, is often believed to be the official name given by the National Socialists. Evidence exists to suggest that Hitler started mapping out his plans as early as 1926, creating two postcard-sized sketches of the Great Arch. He envisioned it as a reinterpretation of Germany’s defeat in World War I. It would have been engraved with the names of the 1.8 million German dead from that war.

On the fourth anniversary of his rise to power, Hitler created the Inspector General of Buildings (GBI) and made Albert Speer the head. The GBI’s mission was to plan and organize the redevelopment of Berlin.

The plans were centered on a seven-kilometer north-south avenue linking two railway stations. The crown jewel of the city would be the Great Hall, whose dome would have been 16 times taller than that of St. Peter’s in Rome. It was to be the largest covered space in the world. The planners even worried about how the breath of the 180,000 it would hold would affect the atmosphere inside.

Connecting the Great Arch and the Great Hall along the avenue were to be new buildings for business and civic use. The avenues would be wide enough for parades of marching troops. Plans also included an artificial lake, a large number of ornamental NS statues, new roads, tunnels, and autobahns.

The scale is difficult to fathom, but it is clear that Berlin would have been transformed from an attractive place to live to a place designed for the state to show itself off. The scale would even have reduced Hitler to a spec when he addressed crowds from the Great Hall.

Some refers to a sculpture made by the Colombian artist Edgar Guzmanruiz in 2013 which is on display at Mythos Germania. It gives a good impression as to how the city would have looked. Guzmanruiz placed a transparent Plexiglas mold of Germania over a model of modern-day Berlin.

The current chancellery building, criticized for being oversized when built in 2001, looks like a garage next to the Führerpalast. The Reichstag building looks like an outhouse.

If you would like a hint of the scale, you can visit Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, Tempelhof airport or the former Reich Air Transport Ministry (now the Finance Ministry) for examples of NS architecture. The 17th of June Street, an avenue running east-west from the Brandenburg Gate, still has double-headed street lamps designed by Speer.

There is also the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, on the opposite end of the avenue at the Grosser Stern, which was moved from the square in front of the Reichstag to make way for a parade ground.

Originally unveiled in 1873 to mark Prussian victories, it was lengthened at Hitler’s request by adding another drum to the pillar. In the southern city of Stuttgart are further traces of Germania: 14 travertine columns made from “Stuttgart marble” for the planned Mussolini Platz in Berlin, but never delivered after the war blocked their transport. They now ring the border of a waste-incineration plant.

It’s the concrete test load pillar, however, that is possibly the clearest reminder of what Hitler and Speer had planned. The communists would have liked it to have been destroyed after the war, but its size makes that impossible. It was used as an engineering test site until 1984.

Recent efforts have tried to turn it into everything from a climbing wall with a cafe at the top to a car showroom. Campaigners fight to preserve it as a reminder of what might have been. Thousands of visitors now visit it on guided tours every year.

Next to the concrete cylinder, there is a 14-meter-tall viewing platform. From there you can see across the city.

The ground level of the Triumphal Arch site was to have been raised by 14 meters. The test structure would have been buried underneath the elevation and sealed by the arch, which would have stood three times as large as Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It was just one small section of the plans to transform the city into an imposing metropolis.

It’s a mistake to see Germania as something that could only exist in theory, says Wolfgang Schäche, an architectural historian and expert on Germania.

“It was never a utopia, rather a very concrete, ideologically loaded projection of architecture and urban construction. All the ideas were checked by engineers and the best constructors of the time, and the Germania project had the support of an entire elite of German building experts who were actively involved in it,” he says.

The Allied bombing attacks actually assisted by clearing large sections of the city. One of Speer’s senior staff members, Rudolf Waters, wrote in his diary: “Today once again the destruction by the allied bombers has assisted us greatly in our planning efforts!”

It was impossible to keep a scheme as grand as Germania a secret. Still, most details were kept from Berlin’s citizens. Even architects working on one structure would have no idea of the other buildings intended to be built near theirs.

The war diverted resources and attention away from Germania, including Speer’s after his appointment to minister of armaments and war production. Planning would have been high priority after the war.

While Germania seems like a distant memory today, it still has a hold on the city to some extent. The “new Berlin” government district was built on the precise opposite axis to where the Great Hall was to have stood.

There is an area in Tempelhof-Schöneberg that has been the source of strife between renters and the government.

Starting in 1938, the authorities bought about 1,000 properties worth 200 million Reichsmarks at a price fixed by them in order to prepare for the building of Germania. “They were marked ‘for destruction’ to make way for the so-called Great Road between the Triumphal Arch and the Great Hall,” according to Richter. “The residents were given similar properties elsewhere in the city.”

With property prices in Berlin currently rising exponentially, the present government is sitting on a gold mine, as the properties were never destroyed. The government recently announced that they would sell the properties to the highest bidder. Residents are angry that they might be pushed out of their homes by increasing rent. It looks like the legacy of Germania’s grandiose plans still lives on.

Kultur

The German term "Heimat," often translated as "homeland," was long thought of as tacky, regressive, and even politically dubious. But since the election, German politicians across the spectrum are using it once again.

Das Kino

This month's Berlin film festival, Europe's first major cinema showcase in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, will shine a light on sexual misconduct in the industry, its director said on Tuesday.

Gesundheit

In the run-up to international World Cancer Day on Sunday, experts have said that about half of all cancer cases in Germany could be prevented by a healthier lifestyle. Across the country, around 500,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year. But experts say things like exercise could cut this figure in half. “Movement can […]